After 1,500 miles on the road in freezing temps, we were thrilled when we finally made it to our first destination at Coral Sands Oceanfront RV Resort – a resort right on the beach in Ormond by the Sea, Florida. We arrived after dark and got to work hooking up Big Red to electric, sewer and water. Knowing we needed to de-winterize Big Red, we pulled out the RV manual to find the instructions and start the process.
To our surprise, the only thing it mentioned was sanitizing/flushing the tanks, but there was nothing about de-winterizing. Thinking it couldn’t be too hard, Max went ahead and hooked up the water to start flushing out the tanks. Immediately, water starting shooting out of tubes underneath our trailer! Max then tried the city water hookup option (instead of the fill tanks), but water continued spilling out everywhere. Slightly concerned at this point, I grabbed my phone and did some quick internet searching on “How to De-Winterize Your RV?”. After all, it couldn’t be that hard, right? We quickly learned that RV plumbing is very model specific, so internet instructions for a different RV aren’t going to help us decode ours.
After trying and failing for over an hour to figure out a fix, we decided to throw in the towel and call an RV repair shop to de-winterize it for us the following day. At 9PM on Friday night, we called RV Tim’s mobile repair shop to leave a message and to our surprise he answered the phone. Not only did he answer on Friday night, but he spent the next hour walking us through step by step on how to de-winterize our trailer. Thanks to RV Tim, we learned that there are eight different hidden valves behind wood panels that need to be turned on or off during the de-winterizing process. What a guy…would highly recommend if you need any RV assistance in the Daytona Beach area!
It was past 10PM when we finally settled into our RV that night and we still hadn’t eaten dinner. Exhausted with a completely empty fridge, we went to the closest open restaurant nearby, IHOP, and finished the night with some comfort breakfast food.
Ormond by the Sea is a quiet little beach town, just 20 minutes north of Daytona Beach. It was the perfect spot to relax and adjust to living in our new tiny home. I’d love to say the adjustment was a breeze, but there were lots of things that still took some getting used to like cooking with a travel sized stove and limited counter space. After bumping into each other 50 times while making dinner, we realized only one person can be in the kitchen at a time due to the tight quarters. So now one person makes dinner while the other is on dish duty as we definitely do not have a dishwasher. We had a great four nights there and continued our journey south towards Jupiter Island, Florida.
